New FICO Solution Helps Banks Grow Bankcard Portfolios in a Dynamic Environment

MINNEAPOLIS—August 2, 2011—FICO (NYSE:FICO), the leading provider of analytics and decision management technology, today announced the availability of a unique new analytic solution designed to spur profitable growth in lenders’ bankcard portfolios. The FICO™ Bankcard Growth Solution is an integrated solution to help lenders improve decisions based on deeper analytic insight and accelerated learning across all stages of bankcard acquisitions and originations.

Specifically, the FICO Bankcard Growth Solution links a lender’s prospecting and offer generation decisions, providing information on responses and new account performance metrics that help the issuer adjust strategies with unprecedented speed. The unique underlying technology is an Analytic Learning Hub, which enables banks to accelerate the feedback cycle and use that information to offer the right card products to the right consumers at the right times.

Using the FICO™ Bankcard Growth Solution, a bank’s acquisition and originations teams can determine earlier in the process if a campaign is attracting the intended customers. With this knowledge, banks can then adjust strategies, change offers and incentives, test through simulation, and update messaging in rapid fashion while a campaign is still underway. In addition, they can use built-in FICO analytics to pinpoint each consumer’s risk, weigh the impact of potential economic shifts into that risk measure, and assess a consumer’s capacity to safely handle additional debt.

“Lenders around the world are aggressively competing to capture the most profitable consumer segments, yet the majority of lenders utilize new customer acquisition solutions that are deficient and often obsolete,” said Dennis Moroney, Research Director, Retail Banking and Cards for TowerGroup. “The banks that will succeed will rely on technologies that monitor ongoing new customer behavior, beginning with the first purchase, to drive decisions on future applicants.”

One top-10 U.S. lender is using the FICO solution as a key component of its strategy to grow market share and increase products per customer. As a first step, the lender launched the solution to empower its branch personnel with pre-approved card offers for qualified customers as they interact with the bank. Subsequent usage included full outbound marketing campaigns that leverage analytics to match the best product promotion to each customer, in order to safely and profitably grow the card portfolio.

“The ‘new normal’ in the banking industry is characterized by economic uncertainty and changing consumer behaviors, so banks have to figure out how to grow profitably despite the lack of stability,” said Andrew Jennings, senior vice president and chief analytics officer, FICO. “The most forward-looking banks are adopting analytic solutions that increase their capacity to learn, adapt and innovate. With its Analytic Learning Hub, the FICO Bankcard Growth Solution helps lenders make the decision that’s appropriate for each customer, learn from that decision’s results, and improve future decisions, in much faster cycles.”

For additional information, see FICO’s latest Insights white paper, “Analytic Learning Loops Propel Bankcard Growth,” available for free on FICO.com.

About FICO
FICO (NYSE:FICO) delivers superior predictive analytics solutions that drive smarter decisions. The company’s groundbreaking use of mathematics to predict consumer behavior has transformed entire industries and revolutionized the way risk is managed and products are marketed. FICO’s innovative solutions include the FICO^® Score — the standard measure of consumer credit risk in the United States — along with industry-leading solutions for managing credit accounts, identifying and minimizing the impact of fraud, and customizing consumer offers with pinpoint accuracy. Most of the world’s top banks, as well as leading insurers, retailers, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies, rely on FICO solutions to accelerate growth, control risk, boost profits and meet regulatory and competitive demands. FICO also helps millions of individuals manage their personal credit health through www.myFICO.com.

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